Despite his agility, Super Fly worries that death will be his end.

Your awful bit of verbiage for the day comes from imdb’s plot synopsis for the blaxploitation classic Super Fly.

Super Fly is a cocaine dealer who begins to realize that his life will soon end with either prison or his death.

Ladies and gents, one more reason why user-sourced content will undo us all.

I was riding my bike home recently — Okay, I should disclose that I was riding home from the bar. In any case, I was moving along pretty fast. I like to ride my bike, and I like it better the faster I go, so I go fast usually. There are a lot of college kids in my neighborhood, and this time of year they’re all out and about doing their fun college things, so maybe I should have exercised more caution. But still, who expects to round a corner and find a throng of sorority chicks playing pattycake in the middle of the street?

If you’ve been in any kind of collision — car, bike, forklift, whatever — you’re familiar with the sense of absolute clarity that precedes it. Time expands, you notice details, at least in retrospect, that would otherwise slip by. What occurred to me, as I stared at the twenty or so young women who walked at me in identical pink T-shirts, was that I was a bowling ball. I was bowling. And I was going to score a three on this frame.

Through some pretty deft (for a drunk guy) maneuvering, I managed to avoid the first two, but I clipped the third one hard on the shoulder, knocking her flat on her ass. A pack of gape-jawed chicks converged over her, squawking concerns and helping her to her feet, while I lay stunned in the street. I got up as quickly as I could, ran up to the girl, and interrogated her frantically. She was tiny — maybe 110 pounds, tops — and I hit her solid, and I was sure I fucked her up in some serious way.

Meanwhile, all the chicks had their own questions for me. Oh my god are you drunk? Why were you going so fast? Oh my god! One of them emerged as the enforcer. She insisted I give her my contact info in case any problems developed in the future.

That’s when I noticed the guy behind me. A regular dude, in a polo shirt and cargo shorts. Quickly, he moved to establish himself as the enforcer, for no other reason I can discern to to score some tang.

“You gotta have him call you, else he’ll just make some shit up.”

Whatever. The lady enforcer told me her number and I called her phone, meanwhile turning my attention again to the girl I’d hit, quizzing her on her shoulder, her back, did she hit her head.

Which is when the dude piped up again. “Brah, you need to chill your shit.”

The University of Texas is an internationally ranked institution, by the way.

Do you know why this is bad language? I mean, yes, there is the lack of specificity of it, the ambiguity of both the verb and the direct object. And there is the unconscious self-caricaturization, the trite, surferesque frat-boy jargon.

But what really offends me about this sentence is the very unpleasant and comical image it evokes, which is not at all appropriate when you’re trying to establish authority in a tense situation.

General Kenneth N. Walker in New Guinea. This is the last photograph taken of him before he died doing something dumb

In a past life, I had the great honor of writing a book about the Pacific air war in World War Two. This book will probably never be published, which is sad for all the veterans and their families who were really hoping to see it hit the shelves before they died, but not sad for the rest of us, because it’s really just 500 pages of mindless war-porn that exalts machines over people and makes no attempt whatsoever at narrative cogency or historical insight. Buffery, as an exasperated colleague liked to put it.

Still, this work exposed me to a treasury of wonderful stories — slice-of-life glimpses at the war-time doings of a thousand faintly sketched characters. Naturally, this being a war book, many of these stories dealt with the slice at the end. None of them was more intriguing to me than that of Brigadier General Kenneth N. Walker.

On January 5, 1943, Walker was riding as an observer aboard a B-17 called San Antonio Rose when that plane went missing during a daylight raid on the Japanese base at Rabaul, New Britain. (I have to remind myself I’m not writing for my previous [non-existent] audience of war-porn buffs — if you don’t know what a B-17 is, might I refer you to the wikipedia page, or to the movies Twelve O’Clock High and Memphis Belle, or to just about any program on the History Channel from ten years ago, before they started soliciting P. Diddy’s expertise on the antebellum South.) In addition to Walker, who was commanding officer of V Bomber Command, the plane carried the executive officer of the 43rd Bomb Group and the commanding officer of the 64th Squadron. (If you’re not familiar with military hierarchy, imagine our army in Australia as a Fortune 500 corporation. Douglas MacArthur, whom I know you know, is like the CEO. Walker is the VP in charge of operations. The other guys are Yale MBAs gunning for his job.)

The thing about Ken Walker is this: First of all, for disappearing on that plane, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, which is the most honorific award a serviceman can receive. Second, at the time, the loss of San Antonio Rose was a big deal because of its high-profile crew, but looking back, it’s a lot bigger because 1.) Walker should not have been on that plane, and 2.) there should have been no daylight raid on Rabaul that day.

This is what happened: Sometime around New Year’s, 1943, George Kenney, Commander of Fifth Air Force (MacArthur’s COO, basically), ordered the largest raid yet on Rabaul. (Rabaul, btw, is a port city on the island of New Britain. In 1943, it was the staging base from which Japan hoped to pinch the supply line between the U.S. and Australia. It was one of three or four very crucial Japanese bases.) When I say “largest raid yet,” I mean more American planes were going to go there and bomb the place than ever before. The reason he did this was because the Japanese appeared to be assembling a supply convoy in Simpson Harbor (on whose shores Rabaul sits), and he hoped to destroy or hamper the convoy.

For Ken Walker, who built his career on a handful of scholarly papers about the efficacy of strategic bombing, this was a good thing, a step in the right direction. In fact, Walker had been agitating for some time about how U.S. bombing strategy in the Pacific was all wrong. We were flying around in small numbers, you see, at night, bombing the odd barge or dinghy (raids on Rabaul focused mainly on the ships that waited in the harbor to bring men and supplies to the front), whereas we should have been doing what they were doing in Europe: Flying around in overwhelming numbers, in broad daylight, totally fucking eradicating entire munitions factories, oil refineries, railyards (also, schools, hospitals, and museums, but that wasn’t the point exactly — well, not at this stage of the war; later, it absolutely was the point).

That is what strategic bombing is (see again Twelve O’Clock High and Memphis Belle): Not simply attacking the enemy, disabling his capacity to make war. Since every bullet, band-aid, and ball of rice that made it to the Japanese front on New Guinea went through Rabaul, it made sense to Walker, who became a general by advocating the idea of strategic bombing, that we should be hitting Rabaul in the same overpowering way that we hit German factories in France.

But even though Kenney ordered more planes than ever before to Rabaul, he ordered them to go there in the same way they’d been going there for months: at night. Walker did not approve. How can you bomb the living shit out of something if you can’t even see it? How did he react? Well, he just went ahead and gave a new order: bomb at noon.

Now, I don’t know how much you know about the military, but this is a pretty big deal. When a general says to you “do this,” and you say yes sir and then go and do something entirely different, that’s really looked down upon. The reason Walker did this was probably because he was sure in the end he’d be vindicated. He just knew that his daylight raid would be a resounding success, and he’d be lauded and rewarded and maybe even promoted.

Walker’s daylight raid was an abysmal failure. What’s more, anyone who’d been in town for more than a few weeks could’ve told him from the beginning that it would be an abysmal failure. Because, you see, the success of strategic bombing in Europe had a lot to do with the fact that we were bombing huge factories that didn’t go anywhere, as opposed to tiny little boats that tend to get out of the way of falling bombs; and that our planes flew moderate distances from England and back, and could count on fighter protection for most of the way, whereas in the Pacific they flew great gaping distances over the ocean, unprotected, dogged by the zero, which was by some measures the most advanced fighter in the world at the time; and that the air corps in Europe had all the planes, two or three times as many as in the Pacific, whose air corps had to make do with the ailing survivors of the Philippines retreat and a boxful of planes stolen from Canada. The result of Walker’s daylight bombing experiment was to get three planes shot down, killing two people and diverting scarce resources to a three-day rescue operation, with no discernible damage done to the enemy at Rabaul — the convoy set sail that very day.

So it was a dumb idea. Fortunately, Walker discovered firsthand just how dumb it was by violating a second direct order from his boss, which was that he never get in a plane and fly on a combat mission. Not only did walker do just that, but he asked all those other important guys to go along with him. And, of course, they all died.

When Kenney found out about the raid, he got on the phone with MacArthur and yelled about how angry he was with Walker, who not only defied his direct orders but got people killed and wasted a lot of time and money in the process. At this time, Kenney was operating under the belief that San Antonio Rose had been found ditched off the coast of some island somewhere, with all crew alive and well. He insisted to MacArthur that when Walker was rescued and returned he be demoted and sent to Sydney to work a remedial desk job in disgrace. MacArthur agreed, then, when it turned out Walker was MIA, he recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honor instead. Politics!

(btw, that other plane was flown by a guy named Jean Jack, who had to ditch [like landing but on water] because his plane was damaged over the target. He and his crew had to wait overnight to be rescued. By then, it was his birthday! IIRC, another plane went down on that mission, with two dead in the crash.)

Most of this information comes out of a book by Martha Byrd called Kenneth N. Walker: Airpower’s Untempered Crusader. (I know, but give her a break: She’s Writing for Air University Press.) It’s a pretty sober account of Walker’s life and the January 5th mission, but there is one fantastic chapter called “Lingering Doubts,” in which Byrd throws around all kinds of wild speculations, like that Walker was taken into captivity after surviving the crash, but he put on the dead pilot’s uniform so the Japanese did not know he was a general; or that he survived the war in a POW camp, then reinvented himself and lived a new life under an assumed identity. Best yet is the speculation as to why he defied Kenney’s orders and went on that mission; Occam’s Razor says he liked the thrill of combat, but there’s always the possibility that he was having long-distance relationship troubles and secret hoped to die over Rabaul, isn’t there?

So there you have it, my favorite dead soldier story. Let’s butter an ear of corn and drink a warm Coors for General Walker, everybody!

Learn English or go home!

All right kiddos, here’s your terrible sentence of the day, courtesy of Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle:

I think this is not just wrong, not just unjust, but truly and utterly immoral in every sense of the word.

Where to even begin with this one . . .

First of all, there are lots and lots of senses of the word ‘immoral.’ There’s at least one sense for every moral there is to be contravened. Promiscuous, for example, is one sense of the word ‘immoral’. Ms. Riddle here is talking about giving entitlements to illegal immigrants, which you wouldn’t say is promiscuous, would you? So the phrase ‘in every sense of the word’ is inaccurate and careless, and it can go.

And isn’t ‘immoral’ a fairly tepid extension of ‘wrong’ and ‘unjust’? It doesn’t do them one better so much as it rephrases them. I mean, we’re talking about political speech here. We’re talking about anti-immigrant political speech. Where is the hyperbolic rhetoric to fire up the nativist hordes? I’m thinking ‘pernicious’. ‘Despicable’. ‘Vile’.

While we’re on the topic of word choice, let’s consider the parenthetical phrase ‘not just unjust’. Then we agree: let’s just strike that one outright.

Though the cliché ‘truly and utterly’ as it is used here can be forgiven for its emptiness on account of the emphasis it lends to ‘immoral’, might I suggest recycling ‘unjust’ — a far more powerful word than ‘immoral’ anyway — to the same effect, in combination with one of the terms above? ‘Vile and unjust’, for example.

Finally, ‘I think this is not just wrong. . .’ Well no shit. I’m sorry, Debbie, but your opinions are far too outrageous and absurd to be confused with fact. However, if you’re trying to invigorate the bigotry of your constituents, you should probably frame them as fact anyway and drop any qualifiers.

So where does that leave us?

This is not just wrong, it is vile and unjust.

Conciseness: the next best thing to shutting the fuck up.

This is the only thing that separates them from Lucifer.

ALCS Game 6; Yankees 5, Angels 2.

Remember, folks: It’s not the Yankees who deserve a painful and lonely death, it’s their fans.

Barack Obama is the unwitting stooge of our reptilian overlords, apparently.

While doing nothing particularly productive today, I trawled across a lovely bit of twisted prose:

The word ‘evil’ is much overused and I don’t say it lightly; but we are dealing with evil in the sense that the word is the reverse of ‘live’.

Evil as horrifying moral concept = said lightly

Evil as anagrammatic non sequitur = not said lightly

The author of this choice bit of verbiage is David Icke. The mass reversal of ‘live’ he’s referring to is . . . well, it’s the plot by our  lizard people overlords to finally genocide away the bulk of the human population by way of the H1N1 flu vaccine — which isn’t a vaccine at all, but a cocktail of lethal poisons — and wrangle the survivors into slavery.

As far as I can tell, he is serious about this.

David Icke is not simply a conspiracy theorist; he’s a conspiracy theorist whose conspiracies are so extreme and implausible as to compel other conspiracy theorists to label him a disinformation agent of the Illuminati. Top among these is that shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the star Alpha Draconis landed on Earth long ago, genetically engineered our forebears to serve as their personal race of slaves, and today orchestrate all dynamics of human activity from the very highest echelons of power.

Icke has a website, but I don’t recommend you visit it — not because it’s really bad or it will poison your mind or anything like that, but because, like most conspiracy theorists, Icke has that special combination of long-windedness and an incapacity for website management that has allowed him to dump the entire voluminous breadth of his paranoia right there onto his homepage, turning his website into a complete fucking memory drain and enemy of browsers everywhere. (Icke seems to regard his lack of brevity as a selling point; an advertisement for an upcoming talk in London boasts, “David will be making his biggest presentation yet with four sections totalling [sic] 8 hours and more than 1,000 illustrations.”)

More on this to come.

But, let me guess, you're his favorite.

Dear Texas business owners: why do you want to talk to me about Jesus?

While I applaud your efforts to remind the flighty denizens of Austin that they are encased in a super-sized dungeon of drawling evangelicalism, I’m just not sure I want to have this conversation with my pizza parlor (to be frank, I’m not sure I want to have any conversation with a restaurant that offers “Pig Wings,” whatever the hell those are).

In any case, you should know that you’ve gotten your quote wrong. It actually goes, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Which is a perfectly nice line, from a literary standpoint, but not as nice as this one:

Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Ezekiel 23:19-20, ladies and gents.

Well, that didn’t exactly work out, did it?

I had forgotten I’d even planned to do this, until just now.

In any case, I got halfway through the book before my check-out expired. By then, another card-carrying member of the unemployed masses (see what I did there?) had reserved the tome, and I couldn’t finish it. Oh well.

Good read if you can get your hands on it. Cheney’s a fairly pedestrian writer, but she knows her stuff, and Tesla is a worthy topic.

In pursuit of some kind of redemption, allow me to post the Handsome Family song that piqued my interest in Mr. Tesla. He led a very strange and wonderful life, that fellow, and so he is an apt target for Rennie Sparks’ eye for the strange and wonderful. She, in turn, does him full justice.

(Okay, well WordPress [wtf? they even filter out lower-case 'p's in their name?] wants to charge me for the privilege of opening your hearts and minds, and The Handsome Family’s label don’t seem too keen on letting their studio stuff get out and about. All I could find were two crappy live shows. So, here, follow this link to a playable audio file, then donate to my legal defense fund after I’m abducted by jack-booted thugs and sued for a gajillion dollars.)

btw, it’s all basically true. My favorite is the reference to a “camera to photograph thoughts.” This idea grew out of hallucinations that Tesla had, in which the inventor saw unfamiliar (and sometimes reputedly prophetic) scenes superimposed over his field of vision. Because these images were purely visual, and layered over his normal, physical ken, Tesla believed they existed tangibly inside his brain, and that he could figure out a way to project them, and all mental images, onto the exterior world.

At one point in the book, Cheney remarked that, had Tesla been born today, he would certainly have been diagnosed schizophrenic and been medicated and counseled until he stopped dreaming his otherworldly dreams. Then where would be be? On direct current, probably.

Again, strange and wonderful.

I sure hope you're withering in the grim chill of a million crushed dreams, and not just checking for ticks.

Maybe next time you’re in town you could swing by and kick me in the nuts.

Did you see this game? I mean, did you see it? Heartbreaking. After riding seven innings in the ruts, the Rox went up 4 to 2 in the eighth by virtue of the absolutely most astonishing play this postseason. Running headlong into what should have been an easy double play, Dexter Fowler — who looks more like a track star than a ball player — just went ahead and jumped over Chase Utley on his way to second.

Yeah. Jumped over him.

Which set up bargain-bin juicer has-been Jason Giambi for an RBI single and delightfully named Yorvit Torrealba for a two-RBI double and there you have it.

And then what happened? Well, Huston Street, Austin-area native (no joke: my sweetheart went to high school with him, derides his Spanish comprehension), decided he wanted to do something other than be a shitty closer and — well, no, he just went ahead and kept being a shitty closer. And gave up three runs.

NLDS game 4. Phillies 5, Rockies 4. Rox are outta the playoffs.

There is only one way this gets worse: A Yankees-Dodgers World Series. Ugh. Go Angels, I guess.

Maybe it’s true; maybe a total ball, farm-reliant team like the Rox just can’t hack it in a league of big-swinging, big-market all stars. Fuck it — I’ll move to Cuba.

UPDATE: Video evidence of Fowler’s hurdling prowess below (til it gets pulled by MLB), replete with obnoxious, trite Kris-Kross soundtrack.

Just in case you didn’t think the Nobel Peace Prize was total bullshit when they gave it away to Al Gore for making a derivative Keynote presentation about pollution, now they’ve given it to a guy who’s fighting two wars simultaneously and whose covert agents continue to abduct and detain foreign nationals, in secret, from any country in the world and without that country’s knowledge.

Before you know it, they’ll be giving the Nobel to known terrorists.

War is Peace.

UPDATE 10/13: I just watched Rachel Campos-Duffy, who is an idiot, say something kinda smart on idiot Sean Hannity’s idiotic show. She said Obama won the prize for not being George W. Bush.

It’s true!

But then she said Gen. David Petraeus shoulda won it, and dumbshit Hannity said Ronald Reagan — or at least George W. Bush — shoulda won it. So nevermind.